Bank of America's official Android app has been able to cash checks by taking photos of them for the last few years. It's an extremely useful feature that eliminates one of the last common reasons to stand in a teller line. It's also bloody frustrating, at least with Bank of America's implementation - I'm a customer, and I've often had to find a solid black backdrop and a couple of table lamps just to make the photo clear enough for BofA's strangely picky system.

Paying bills sucks. Everything about the entire experience, from reading the email/letter, writing the umpteenth check/visiting the umpteenth website, and kissing that hard-earned money goodbye, is considerably unpleasant. Then there's the consistently broken promise of doing better next month only to find that after forgoing all of that fast food, you actually managed to spend more money than the month before. Again, it sucks. The new Mobilligy won't make it not suck, but there's a chance it will at least make it suck less.

For as long as I can remember, I've been using Mint to manage my personal finances. It syncs with all my accounts/credit cards, and the mobile app is pretty fantastic. Today, the Mint team pushed a pretty major update to the app in the Play Store, which brings a whole slew of new features to both the phone and tablet interfaces:

Chase, a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase, today released its official and long-awaited mobile banking app for Android. Since I am a Chase customer with 3 credit cards and a checking account (migrated from WaMu), I decided to take it out for a quick spin.

The Chase app features the following:

instant check deposits by taking photos of the front and back with your phone's camera - it's not the first bank to do this, but it was certainly the #1 wanted feature on my list

viewing account balances and transaction histories

paying bills using Chase bill pay

paying credit card balances

money transfers, including both account-to-account and wire transfers

ATM/branch finder

The app is very secure - it requires your password every time you sign on and does not store it anywhere.